Similarities have been drawn between Bowie's song andElvis Presley's song "Black Star" which contains the lyrics "When a man sees his black star, he knows his time...has come."[12] The repeated line "at the centre of it all" is also present in Bowie's 2002 single "Slow Burn" and appears to originate inAleister Crowley'sThe Book of Lies.[13]
The song was originally over eleven minutes long, but after learning thatiTunes would not post singles over ten minutes in length, Bowie andTony Visconti edited it down to 9:57, making it Bowie's second-longest track behind "Station to Station". Bowie did not want to confuse listeners by releasing different single and album versions.[14]
"Blackstar" was released on 19 November 2015, as a digital download[15] and in 2017 as a 12" single in Japan only. In addition to its release on thealbum of the same name, the track was used (in a different version[16]) as the opening music for the television seriesThe Last Panthers.[17]
The music video for "Blackstar" is a surreal ten-minute short film directed byJohan Renck (the director ofThe Last Panthers). It depicts a woman with a tail, played byElisa Lasowski,[18] discovering a dead astronaut and taking his jewel-encrusted skull to an ancient, otherworldly town. The astronaut's bones float toward a solar eclipse, while a circle of women perform a ritual with the skull in the town's centre.[19]
Bowie in the music video
The film was shot in September 2015 in a film studio inGreenpoint, Brooklyn.[20] The filmmaking process was highly collaborative, with Bowie making many suggestions and sending Renck sketches of ideas he wanted incorporated. While both men agreed to leave the video open to interpretation (Renck initially refused to confirm or deny that the astronaut in the video wasMajor Tom), Renck has offered several details regarding its meaning. Renck later said on a BBC documentary "to me, it was 100% Major Tom."[21] It was Bowie who requested that the woman have a tail, his only explanation being "it's kind of sexual". Renck has speculated that Bowie may have been contemplating his own mortality and relevance to history while developing the video, but said that the crucified scarecrows were not intended as a messianic symbol. Renck has also stated that Bowie portrays three distinct characters in the video: the introverted, tormented, blind "Button Eyes"; the "flamboyant trickster" in the song's middle section; and the "priest guy" holding the book embossed with the "★" symbol.[19] Saxophonist Donny McCaslin said that Bowie had told him the song was aboutISIL, although an official spokesperson for Bowie denied that the song was inspired in any way by the Middle East situation.[22][23]
The choreography, notably that of the three dancers featured in an attic sequence, was drawn from other media, including Max Fleischer'sPopeye the Sailor cartoons. "[Bowie] sent me this old Popeye clip on YouTube and said, 'Look at these guys.' When a character is not active, when they’re inactive in these cartoons, they’re sort of created by these two or three frames that are loops so it looks like they’re just standing there, wobbling. It’s typical in those days of animation and stop-motion, you would do that to create life in something that was inactive. So we wanted to see if we could do something like this in the form of dance, we had to do that."[24] The female dancer in the attic sequence also performs a signature movement from the"Fashion" music video.
Ryan Dombal ofPitchfork praised the song, labeling it as "Best New Track". Dombal also described the track as "wonderfully odd and expansive" and noted that it is "closer to the cocaine-fueled fantasias of 1976'sStation to Station than almost anything he's [Bowie] done since".[5]Pitchfork Media named "Blackstar" the 11th best music video of 2015.[27]Simon Critchley commented on Bowie's connection toElvis Presley, referring to the lyrics of Presley's song "Black Star" as a clue.[28][29] In the annualVillage Voice's Pazz & Jop mass critics poll of the year's best in music in 2016, "Blackstar" was tied at number 9, withRihanna's "Work".[30]
^Rolling Stone Staff (28 June 2018)."The 100 Greatest Songs of the Century – So Far".Rolling Stone. Retrieved31 May 2023.What they accomplished was a sound unlike anything else in music history, a combination of jazz, electronics, progressive rock...
^Ratliff, Ben (13 January 2016)."Popcast: Love, Death and David Bowie".The New York Times.Archived from the original on 28 February 2017. Retrieved1 March 2017.When a man sees his black star/he knows his time, his time has come.
^"PAZZ+JOP 2016".Village Voice. 25 January 2017. Archived fromthe original on 26 January 2017. Retrieved28 January 2017.
